Inside the engineering bay, Raven stood over a cluttered workbench, her eyes bloodshot from hours of staring at wire diagrams. She looked up as the door slid open, her face instantly lighting up as she saw Finn walking in, his arm bound but his posture steady.
"Finn!" Raven cried, dropping her tools and throwing her arms around his uninjured side.
Finn let out a sharp, ragged gasp, his face twisting as he carefully pried her arms back. "Woah, woah! Easy, Rae. I love the enthusiasm, but my shoulder is currently held together by stitches and sheer willpower."
Raven let out a breathless laugh, wiping a stray tear from her cheek. "Sorry. It's just good to see you vertical."
Clarke followed him into the room, a small, weary smile on her face. "What's the development, Raven? Any change?"
Before Raven could answer, the nearby radio receiver crackled to life, static hissing through the speaker before a loop of a familiar, desperate voice played out yet again.
'This is Jasper Jordan. We need help. Forty-seven of us are trapped inside Mount Weather. If anyone can hear this, we are on level five—'
Raven let out a long, heavy sigh, running a hand through her hair. "That's been playing on a loop for the last hour. It's a closed-circuit distress signal, but it's weak. They're broadcasting from the inside."
"Then we have to give Bellamy a way to get them out," Clarke said, stepping up to the workbench. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the complex, metallic electronic device she had taken from Emerson's tactical vest on the ridge. She placed it on the table. "I took this from the Mountain Man guard. It's what they use to control the Reapers. It emits some kind of sonic pulse."
Raven's eyes narrowed with immediate technical curiosity. She picked it up, probing the circuitry with a small screwdriver. "Yeah... yeah, I see the tone generator. I can totally replicate this frequency."
"Good," Clarke said, her jaw setting. "If we can neutralize the Reapers, the tunnels become a viable option for the Grounder army."
Finn leaned against the desk, looking at the device with a frown. "And what happens if the Mountain Men change the frequency? We'll be walking into a meat grinder."
Before Clarke could debate the point, the door hissed open again. Octavia stepped into the room, her face tight with worry. The moment she saw Finn standing there, she froze, the words dying in her throat.
"Finn," she breathed, immediately walking over and pulling him into a brief, fierce embrace.
"Ah! Okay, note to self: no more hugs from anyone," Finn wheezed, wincing as he gently patted her back. "But... Thanks, Octavia. For everything. For keeping me alive out there when things went south."
Octavia pulled back, shaking her head. "Jason is the one you should be thanking, Finn. Bellamy and I just did what he told us to do. If he hadn't planned the whole thing with the duel, we wouldn't have been able to set those traps for your opponent." She turned her sharp gaze to the workbench. "Raven, any word from Bellamy?"
"Nothing yet," Raven muttered, her fingers flying across a keyboard as she began decoding the frequency device.
Octavia's brow furrowed, her hands clenching into fists. "Lincoln is still missing, too. He should have been back by now if the drop went cleanly."
"They'll be okay," Clarke insisted, though her own heart was hammering against her ribs.
"They better be," Raven said, not looking up from her monitor. "Your whole plan rests on Bellamy getting through those intake doors."
"He will," Clarke said.
"Well, well, well... if it isn't the newly awakened survivor," a lazy, melodic voice purred from the threshold.
They all froze, turning slowly to see Jason leaning against the doorframe. He wore his usual calm, elegant smile, but the collective gaze of the room immediately dropped to his forearms. His sleeves were rolled up, and his hands and wrists were completely painted in thick, drying crimson.
Jason blinked, looking at their horrified expressions, and raised his bloody hands in an innocent, open gesture. "What?"
"Why are your hands bloody, Jason?" Raven asked, her voice dropping into a tense, defensive register as she instinctively stepped closer to him.
Jason looked down at his palms, then back up, his smile widening. "Ohhh, this? Well, don't be alarmed. I was actually just practicing my civic duty. I was trying to stop someone from bleeding to death, you see. Turns out, when you repeatedly insert sharp objects into a gentleman's thigh, the structural integrity of the skin becomes rather compromised. I was merely holding the leaks closed. I'm practically a humanitarian."
He extended his arms toward Finn, his eyes bright with a manic warmth. "Come here, Finn. Let me properly welcome you back to the land of the living."
Finn immediately took a step back, holding up his hands. "Yeah, no. Hugs from Raven I can handle, but from you? Absolutely not. Stay right there."
Clarke stepped forward, her face pale as she looked at the gore on his fingers. "Jason... Did you kill him? Did you kill the guard?"
Jason stared at her for a long, silent beat, the playful glint in his eyes hardening into a cold, dead vacuum. "Not yet," he said softly. "He was just getting to the interesting part of his vocabulary."
Before Clarke could launch into a reprimand, the camp's newly repaired public address system crackled to life over the speakers in the ceiling.
"Chancellor Kane, Jason, and Clarke Griffin, please report to the south airlock immediately. Repeat: Kane, Jason, and Clarke, report to the south airlock immediately."
Jason let out a soft, theatrical sigh, lazily wiping a smear of blood from his wrist onto his dark trousers. He looked up at the speaker, his smile returning like a mask.
"Ah, the sweet sound of middle management," Jason murmured, gesturing toward the corridor. "Duty calls, ladies and gentlemen. Let's go see what kind of mess the Chancellor has managed to cook up now."
——-
The corridor leading to the high-security holding cells was thick with tension, the heavy thud of boots echoing off the concrete walls as Clarke and Jason arrived at the south airlock sector. Marcus Kane and Abby Griffin stood near the reinforced viewing window of Emerson's cell, their faces pale under the flickering fluorescent lights.
"Did he say something?" Kane asked the moment he saw them, his voice tight.
"No..." Abby replied, her hands trembling as she held a digital medical pad. "But his blood did. Jackson ran the analysis. He found genetic marker anomalies—specific celestial radiation filtering that can only come from someone who was born on the Ark."
Clarke's breath caught in her throat. She stepped forward, her eyes wide with a horrifying clarity. "It's started."
Kane looked between them, his brow furrowing deeply. "Are you sure it didn't come from the blood transfusion that we gave him to save his life on the ridge?"
"No," Abby said flatly, her voice cracking. "I took the control sample well before that."
"They're bleeding my friends," Clarke whispered, the pieces of the puzzle violently slamming into place. "They're harvesting them."
Abby's gaze suddenly drifted down, away from Clarke, landing squarely on the quiet boy standing just behind her. Her eyes widened in absolute horror as she took in the sight of Jason's hands and forearms, entirely coated in thick, drying crimson gore.
"What have you done?" Abby gasped, stepping back.
Jason met her gaze, his face however, was ab absolute mask of stoic detachment. His eyes were entirely hollow as he looked past her, fixing a completely blank, dead stare onto Emerson through the glass.
"What is necessary," Jason said as his voice dropped into a terrifyingly calm tone. He moved closer to the cell, his presence radiating a chilling authority. Inside the cell, Emerson looked up, his eyes widening in pure panic as he saw the blood covering the boy's hands. He scrambled back against his restraints. "What did you do to him? What did you do to my man?"
Jason tilted his head slightly, a faint, humorless smile playing on his lips. "What did I do? No, Captain Emerson. It is entirely about what you have done. You and your wretched little people inside that hill. The very same people who stole my friends from the wilderness, dragged them into the dark, and are currently draining the literal life from their veins."
"We don't know that for certain yet," Kane intervened, his voice betraying his own desperate need for order. "We don't have proof of harvesting—"
"Yes, we do!" Clarke yelled, turning on him fiercely. "We were genetically engineered by generations of solar radiation on the Ark. The Mountain Men weren't. Our bone marrow is the only thing that can cure them, and they are taking it by force!"
Kane stepped between them, his hands raised. "What are you doing, Jason? Control yourself."
Jason didn't blink. He drew himself up to his full, imposing height, "Listen to me very carefully, Marcus. If even one of my people dies inside that mountain... if a single heart stops beating because of your cowardice or their cruelty, I will not just breach their walls. I will tear that mountain down stone by stone, and I will ensure that every single man, woman, and child inside tastes the absolute agony of a slow, suffocating death. I will leave nothing but ash and bone."
Just as the final words left his lips, the heavy iron security doors hissed open. Indra walked into the containment sector, her expression hardened like flint. In her grip, she dragged the secondary Mountain Man. The man was a brutalized, weeping mess, he was now in Emerson's undamaged containment suit, bleeding into the suit where Jason had stabbed him. Abby gasped, pressing a hand to her mouth at the sight of the bloody, mangled soldier.
"What have you done?!" Kane roared, turning furiously toward Indra.
Jason completely ignored Kane's outburst. He stepped forward with a terrifying fluidity, taking the groaning guard roughly from Indra's grasp. He dragged the heavy, suited body right up to the glass window, forcing the broken soldier to stand directly in front of the horrified, watching eyes of Captain Emerson.
"Consequently," Jason murmured softly, his voice a deadly whisper.
Before anyone could comprehend his movement, Jason's bloody fingers hooked into the seals of the guard's helmet and neck collar. With a single movement he took off the top portion of the protective suit completely away, exposing the man's bare face to the ambient air of the Ark camp.
The reaction was instantaneous and horrific.
The guard let out a blood-curdling, agonizing shriek as the microscopic traces of external radiation hit his unadapted skin. His face instantly flushed a violent, blistering red, his skin boiling and blistering in real-time as the cellular structure began to rapidly liquefy.
"Stop it! Jason, stop!" Abby screamed, lunging forward to intervene, her medical instincts overriding her fear.
But Kane caught her by the waist, throwing his weight backward to hold her back. "Abby, no! Stay back!" Kane shouted, his own eyes wide with sheer horror as they watched the man literally cook alive from the inside out, his screams dissolving into a wet, choking rattle before his body went entirely limp in Jason's hands.
Inside the cell, Emerson slammed his hands against the glass, his face twisted in absolute shock and unadulterated terror as he watched his soldier die an excruciating death in a matter of seconds.
Jason let go of the collar, allowing the smoking, blistered corpse of the guard to collapse heavily onto the concrete floor at his feet. He looked down at the body, then raised his eyes to meet Emerson's trembling gaze through the reinforced view-shield.
"That's one," Jason said softly, as he lazily wiped a fresh speck of blood from his cheek. He leaned closer to the glass, his smile returning like a ghost. "Think of it as a countdown, Carl."
With a slow, elegant turn, Jason strolled out of the containment bay, leaving the horrified leadership of the Ark standing in the heavy, suffocating silence of the dead.